Don't be disabled in Japan

Being disabled in Japan is a real sumbitch. I’ve never witnessed any outright rudeness or hostility toward those with disabilities, but the sort of passive-aggressive condescension that the disabled are subjected to in this country may very well be worse.

My school is not a particularly horrible example, but there have been a few incidents that have rather pissed me off. Amongst the 170 or so students at Kosaka Junior High, one is confined to a wheelchair. As best I can tell, his mental faculties are perfectly intact; he just can’t walk. Still, the only place left for him in every class is at the very back of the classroom. When one considers that the vast majority of lessons in a Japanese school take place lecture-style, with the instructor at the front and the students in neat rows, this is a serious disadvantage. I always walk amongst the students and teach from different areas of the classroom, but my class is only one of at least six that this kid is taking. I’ve even taken to randomly (well, somewhat…) rearranging the students to allow for different experiences in the same classroom, but I know that I’m the only one to do this.

Worse than this, though, was the special class I visited for the “mentally disabled.” There are presently only a few students in the school who qualify for this sort of special instruction, but I found the approach quite bothersome. The students are about 13 or 14 years old, and they may be a little slow to pick up on things but they’re certainly not severely handicapped. (In fact, the only handicap I observed in one girl there was that she was really, really, really short. Which, in Japan, means that she is about the size of a housecat. She’s a bright kid, though, and didn’t have any trouble with the English lessons I helped her with.) I found the treatment they receive to be subtly quite demeaning, with the “class” consisting entirely of childish games and such. The head instructor also played this obnoxious Sesame Street-esque CD for the entire 50 minutes of the class. Interacting with the kids was fun enough, but my thoughts were constantly interrupted by fantasies of me alone in a room with that CD player and a 12 gauge shotgun. Damn, it feels good to be a gangster…

I hold onto hope that the instructors of these classes will make an effort to respect the dignity of the students, but there’s not much more I can do. I’m only an observer when I show up, so my opinions are irrelevant. Moreover, I have no training (and frankly, no interest) in special ed., so I’m hardly qualified to make an issue of it. My gut instinct still says, though, that something just ain’t right.